So, are you a happy dancer?

ALBERT NERENBERG, The Gazette03.03.2011

Students dressed as a polar bears rehearse their dance before the start of the annual Caracol Festival in Manila on February 27, 2011. The Caracol festival is organised to express the environmental awareness of the city.

The Happy Dance craze started with a TV commercial in which Lotto 6/49 winners jump for joy like there's no tomorrow. The winners freak their beans, pump their fists and flip out. It is a beautiful and enviable form of ecstasy. Every burden evaporates as the Happy Dancer goes completely berserk.

The ad was a hit as were the spinoff Happy Dance competitions. And the expression Happy Dance has quickly become part of common parlance. The catch is to truly do the Happy Dance, you have to win the Lotto 6/49, and the odds of that are around 14 million to one.

But, you would think after doing the Happy Dance, lottery winners would be the happiest people in the world. Let's ask this question: Who's happier? People who win lotteries or people who break their necks?

If you said lottery winners, you might well be wrong.

After a few years of getting used to their new situations, lottery winners and paraplegics are surprisingly close to being equally happy.

This stunning assertion is part of a new wave of the so-called science of happiness, which might actually have something new to offer. I myself have never been a big fan of happiness studies or books. Happiness, some believe was an idea invented by marketing people to get us to keep buying stuff so we'll feel "happy." The word "happiness" itself is questionable, a tease, indefinable and difficult to measure. However, in recent years a slew of new books and studies points to a possible breakthrough.

Harvard psychology professor Dan Gilbert, author of the bestseller Stumbling on Happiness, is red hot partially thanks to a barn-burning lecture which he gave at TED, a high profile think-tank event in Monterey, Calif., now making the rounds on the Internet.

In it, Gilbert lays out a story of lottery winners and people who became paraplegics. He explains how, amazingly, a year after losing the ability to walk, paraplegics can be surprisingly happy. Gilbert cites an intriguing and fresh neuroscientific principle to back this up.

Human beings, have a powerful and large part of their brains that is designed to imagine the future. We often use it to imagine how happy we would be if we had a bigger house, if were tooling around in a bright red sports car, or if we won the lottery. If we won those millions, we imagine, we would be doing the Happy Dance all the time. But in fact, another part of us, a powerful part of the unconscious mind, is always trying to balance that out as self-defence. Too much Happy Dancing might lead you to the asylum. Maybe you should calm down.

The Happy Dance ads work exactly like this brain process, creating a simulation of a future which is dangled in front of our eyes. An ad for the 6/49 in British Columbia goes even farther, showing people doing the Happy Dance in super slow motion under the headline: "Some moments last forever."

In fact, that is absolute bunkola, say the happiness scientists. Because of the way we're built, what you feel when you win the lottery specifically doesn't last forever. It sometimes doesn't even last a few weeks. That's the weird part.

"Sure you're ecstatic at first," says University of Virginia psychology professor Ted Wilson, who has co-authored a number of seminal happiness studies with Gilbert. "Winning the lottery tends to have a terrible effect on social relationships. People almost always get jealous and people lose their friends and their family members. And they lose what really matters, the people in their lives."

That's the part that makes winning the lottery possibly worse than breaking your neck. But what makes it equal to breaking your neck is perhaps even more interesting.

Just as we have the power to imagine ourselves in all kinds of fancy clothes and sport cars, another part of our brain is always trying to keep us on an even keel.

According to Wilson and Gilbert, the unconscious mind is an incredible rationalizer and is always sorting and evening things out, sometimes while you sleep. After a few days, the pleasure of winning the lottery fades into the background and everyday emotion returns. Incredibly, the same principle is at work with terrible events in our lives. We're shocked at first by that car accident, but even previously unimaginable horrific outcomes, fade into the background with time.

On a minor level, many people experience this when the Habs lose a critical game. They feel like their world could be ending.

This is called "focalism." Focalism is the false belief that our lives are mainly about one happiness-inducing thing like a single relationship or a hockey season. However, often a short time later, our powerful brain will pack away the bad memories and we're on to fresh shenanigans.

"People think they will be sad for weeks when something bad happens," said Wilson who has studied perceived sports tragedies. "By the next day, people are going to movies, playing with their kids, doing a variety of things."

Our ability to create "normal" is our greatest adaptive strength, and it's something our powerful unconscious does even without our consent. This may be the root of folk wisdom like "Time heals all wounds" and "This too shall pass." This process is bigger than us. When we fight it, we might make ourselves unhappy. Its existence is likely due to millions of years of evolutionary adaptation to changing fortune and disaster.

So, yes, winning the lottery is good. I'd take the money. But it's the actual change from Average Joe to Lottery Super Winner that inspires the Happy Dance. And that generally only happens once. You need to keep winning the lottery and going from loser to winner over and over again if you want the Happy Dance to last. And, amazingly, if that actually happens, the outcome can be even worse.

"Winning the lottery isn't always what it's cracked up to be," says Evelyn Adams, who won the New Jersey lottery twice, once in 1985 and once in 1986, for a total of $5.4 million. Today, Adams lives in a trailer, having spent her winnings, handed out some to relatives and gambled the rest away.

"I won the American dream but I lost it, too. It was a very hard fall. It's called rock bottom," Adams told financial industry website Bankrate.com. Adams is in a peculiar hell, because now she must compare her sad-sack life to her days of being a multi-millionaire. That would be the Total Misery Dance.

So how do paraplegics learn to be happy with their outcomes?

"Much recent data show that people fare reasonably well in a variety of tragic and traumatic circumstances - Christopher Reeve was not unusual," Gilbert told Harvard Magazine. "Paraplegics are generally quite happy people. And blind people often say the worst problem they have is that everyone assumes they are sad. People do feel devastated if they go blind, but it does not last. The human mind is constituted to make the best of the situations in which it finds itself. But most people don't know they have this ability."

According to Gilbert, this amazing incredible talent is wired into us all. We can adapt to the very worst situations and many of us do. Our brain takes care of us, and our unconscious mind is always trying to wrestle us into balance. If we experience disaster, our eyes suddenly open to positive alternatives. If we spend days laying on the beach, we get bored and we look for trouble. The common denominator? We're mapping out a strategy to maximize long-term survival. Lotto 6/49 didn't invent the Happy Dance, African-Americans, whose ancestors were slaves, did. The dance itself appears to come from football touchdown celebrations, popularized by American football star, Billy (White Shoes) Johnson in the 1970s.

Even in terrible situations, human beings, it appears, have the ability to "synthesize" happiness. Men laugh at their executions. People enjoy jail. Heartbroken people write hit pop songs. It's part of a psychological immune system that allows us to find joy in the bleakest situations. We find the bright side of divorce, we see good in being fired, we sometimes find virtue in breaking our legs. When we can't be with the one we love, we learn to love the one we're with. It might explain how people who suffer long, terrible traumas often have tremendous senses of humour. How poor children can be incredibly cheerful.

Most of us make little of this quality, because no one came along and said it was special. But it is.

Torontonian Judith Snow calls herself an Inclusion Activist, but for the purposes of this article she is a quadriplegic. Snow has spinal muscular atrophy, one of the muscular dystrophies. She was born partially paralyzed and lost movement throughout her life, finally losing the ability to move her last limb, her right arm, when she was 26.

"I remember feeling distressed when I lost my left arm," she said. "But when I lost the use of my right arm, I felt a kind of relief. Because it was over. It was done. Perhaps I was learning to be happy?"

Snow says she sent herself on a bit of a mission after that because she felt the unbearable weight of people assuming her life was tragic.

"Who wants to wake up every morning thinking, 'I have a horrible life'," she said. Snow set out to find out whether her life really was a tragedy. She raised some money and travelled the world, speaking to groups dealing with disabilities and asking them the exact same set of questions. One of those questions yielded a potent answer.

"I ask, 'What effect do people with disabilities have on other people?' " she said. "Eighty per cent of people around the world said they're really good at making other people feel happy."

When Judith said that, it made my eyes tear. Because it's true. Even though she can't move her arms or legs and has never won the lottery, Judith is a Happy Dancer.

According to the author of The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt, trauma itself has something to teach us.

"We need trauma and setbacks to grow," he said in an interview from his office at the University of Virginia. The reason paraplegics find happiness is their frame of reference changes. In happiness everything is relative.

"You can adapt to a broken neck," he said. "When you get your language back and you can talk and you 're able to eat solid foods, every little success is an enormous joy."

Haidt even says certain traumas can be really good for you, provided you get through them.

"One of the best things that can happen to you is to get cancer between the ages of 15 and 30, and survive it," he said. "People who don't face traumas are liable to break later in life when they do. But those who make it are going to have a tremendous zest, incredible optimism and a stunning appetite for life."

One of Canada's most zestful organizations has to be RealTime Cancer, a national coalition of young people who have cancer. The organization specializes in a feisty, humorous, fight-back strategy against the often lethal disease. Despite the fact that, as one of the group's members Geoff Eaton says, survival rates haven't improved for young people, and young people are seriously overlooked in cancer research, a raging optimism permeates the group. If you look at their website (www.youngadultcancer.ca/), you may think you are looking at the happiest club in the world. These people are smiling and laughing, and shaving their heads. They look blazingly happy.

It took me a while to figure out the "real time" part.

Perhaps this is the third aspect of the new happiness science, one that scientists are starting to figure out now: Part of being happy is making the best of the present, in fact it's just being part of the present. Let your brain take care of you. There is a strange sensation, when we realize how lucky we are, and how magical and happy every second can be.

While the secret of happiness is perhaps elusive, the secret to unhappiness is a little more obvious. It's delaying happiness to some moment in the future. It's hating where you are now. It's hating the people you're with. It's failing to see all that you have. People who are constantly buying stuff to be happy are missing the point. One thing is for sure; unhappiness is thinking you need to win millions of dollars before you can jump for joy. When life hands the unhappiness expert lemons, they scream, "What do I do with these things?"

Science now says you can create happiness in almost any situation. That is our superpower. Nothing is actually stopping you from the doing the Happy Dance anytime you want.

To me this is an amazing new discovery. We always knew we could look on the bright side, we just didn't realize how brilliant we were at it.

"We have within us," says Gilbert, "the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing."

Gilbert even suggests we might be close to unlocking the actual secret to happiness.

Here it is:

The ability to make the best of a bad situation. Maybe you already knew that. But that's it. When you do that, you are flexing humanity's greatest and most powerful muscle by far.

albert@elevatorfilms.com

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ON THE WEB

New happiness studies show humans have the ability to "synthesize happiness" in almost any situation.

The Happy Dance is a strange example of this, as actors and contestants artificially create happiness even though they haven't won anything. See the lecture that started it all and people who find ways to make the best out of terrible situations:

Great Happy Dance in an ad for an interest- bearing chequing account:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYDbXGF9jYM&feature=related

Lotto 6/49 Happy Dance contest video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5Y9YPNUTq4&feature=related

An ad for the B.C. version of Lotto 6/49 ends with the statement "Some feelings last forever."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gd-mxoHas8

The lecture that started it all:

Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert and author gives a barn-burner of a lecture on the new science of happiness.

www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/97

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor makes the best of a stroke:

Talk about making the best of a bad situation. When Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor realizes she is having a stroke, she declares, "Wow! This is so cool" - and turns disaster into opportunity. Keep an open mind, you may be swept away.

www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/229

Website about Judith Snow, Inclusion Activist and Happy Dancer:

http://dawn.thot.net/Judith_Snow.html

Football Happy Dance competition:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PQMqG_6lEo&feature=related

The Happiness Project:

A website by a woman who is writing a book about the year she spent test-driving every happine- - - principle, tip, theory, and scientific study she could find, from Oprah to Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism.

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